Advertisement

Advertisement

New Scientist Live

Be a player, hate the game: Beating sex discrimination

By Jessica Hamzelou

“You have to be far savvier to get ahead as a woman than you do as a man”

(Image: Hastings College of the Law)

Have you heard that women are paid less than men because they don’t negotiate? Or that they rule themselves out of CEO positions by choosing motherhood over their careers? Joan C. Williams, professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, disagrees with such claims. Not only has she got solid evidence to show that it is gender bias that is holding women back at work, she has put together a list of strategies they can use to deal with it.

The scientific literature on gender bias doesn’t make for a pleasant read, with study after study having found that women face unfair pressures in the workplace. After an exhaustive analysis, Williams determined that most of the bias women experience falls into one of four categories. Together, these biases can create an environment in which a woman is expected to repeatedly prove her worth, exhibit a specific blend of masculine and feminine behaviors, support her female colleagues and somehow avoid letting motherhood affect her working life at all.

Once Williams had identified these patterns, she set about publicizing them. She began by setting up an online game of “gender bias bingo,” in which players can check off behaviors they have experienced and send in their own stories of discrimination. “Within three days, I’d received over 400 emails,” she says.

Advertisement

As part of her campaign, Williams gave talks at universities. “When I began to talk about these four patterns, women in the audience immediately recognized them,” she says. “As soon as I began to describe the patterns, they began to laugh and nudge each other.” But knowledge alone isn’t always power. “I realized that by just describing women’s experience, I was depressing them,” says Williams. “I decided to stop talking about it until I had some strategies that women could use to navigate these patterns. I had to provide proactive strategies, otherwise I would just make people feel helpless.”

To collect sound career advice for women, Williams interviewed 127 successful female professionals with jobs in science, business and law. “Basically, over a three-year period, every time I met a savvy woman, I asked if I could interview her,” says Williams. She asked each woman about the gender biases she had experienced over her career, and the strategies that had helped her overcome them.

Over and over again

Williams calls the first pattern of bias Prove-It-Again!. Because the stereotypical successful professional is a masculine man, women have to work harder to prove themselves, she says.

Are you recording this?

Many of the women Williams spoke to said that they address Prove-It-Again! bias by doing just that&colon; proving themselves over and over. But there are some strategies women can use to avoid burning themselves out. “It’s very important for women to keep careful, real-time records of all objective metrics they have met, and all the compliments they have received,” says Williams. “You have to remind people of your successes.”

Women must employ another strategy to do that, navigating the second type of bias&colon; the Tightrope. “Women have to behave in masculine ways – being assertive and direct – in order to be seen as competent, but they have to behave in feminine ways lest they be respected but not liked,” says Williams. “Men don’t.”

When a woman highlights her own achievements, she is seen to be bragging – a behavior associated with masculinity. Getting around this obstacle requires what Williams calls “gender judo” – behaving in a seemingly stereotypical way in order to get non-stereotypical results.

“One effective way of doing that is to form a posse – a group of men as well as women to celebrate each other’s successes,” suggests Williams. “You’re doing something very masculine – bragging – but you’re doing it in a feminine way, because it is seen as more suitable for a woman to be celebrating someone else’s achievements, especially those of a man.”

Tightrope bias also gets in the way of negotiations at work. “There’s a large literature saying that women don’t get ahead because they don’t negotiate for themselves, but that’s irresponsible,” says Williams. “Women don’t negotiate because they’re not idiots – they know that if they do negotiate, they are going to encounter pushback.” The answer here is to employ more gender judo. “Say someone else told you to negotiate,” she says.

Sadly, this means playing right into gender stereotypes, and reinforcing them as a result. “But what’s the alternative?” asks Williams. “If you want to fight the feminist battle for women to be entitled to be as aggressive as men, go for it. But if you just want a larger salary, you’ll have to be strategic.”

A mother’s burden

Williams labels the third type of bias as the Maternal Wall. “After women have children, they face Prove-It-Again! squared,” she says. “They have to prove themselves all over again, often because they are assumed to be no longer competent or committed to their jobs.”

The tightrope that mothers have to walk is even narrower than that faced by other women, because additional stereotypes about mothers come into play. “If they’re not at the lab, they’re expected to be at home with their children, even if they are at a conference presenting a paper,” she says. “On the other hand, women who work long hours and show themselves to be committed to work tend to be disliked and held to higher performance standards because they are seen as not being good mothers, and therefore are not good women.”

Williams advises new mothers to discuss with their boss their short-term and long-term career goals and exactly what they can still offer their company. “If you can still travel, say so. If you’re the primary earner, say so,” she says. “You’re trumping their bias with information.”

Pulling together

The fourth type of bias women encounter comes from other women – what Williams calls Tug of War. Traditionally, “queen bees” have been accused of undercutting their female colleagues to get ahead. But blaming them for this kind of behavior is wrong, says Williams. “That’s not an individual woman with a personality problem – that’s gender bias in the environment, fuelling conflicts among women.”

Williams says Tug of War tends to be a real factor in science because there are so few women. She recommends approaching women you feel in conflict with to work out a truce and send the message that unprofessional behavior won’t go unnoticed.

But there’s another message to be learned from the Tug of War bias. “Do men always support men? No,” Williams points out. “We don’t expect them to. But women are often faulted for not supporting other women. It is not fair at all.”

“Gender bias shapes everyday workplace interactions in profound ways,” says Williams. “Women have to be more politically astute than men – performing gender judo and pretzelling themselves in nine different directions while they’re walking a tightrope. It’s no wonder there aren’t more women in science, technology, engineering and math.”

While it’s true that organizations need to change, “we’ve been saying exactly that for about 40 years straight, and the organizations haven’t changed,” says Williams. “It’s time to give women strategies to deal with what’s out there. You have to be far savvier to get ahead as a woman than you do as a man.”

Profile

Joan C. Williams is distinguished professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and director of the Center for WorkLife Law. She co-wrote her latest book, What Works for Women at Work (New York University Press), with her daughter, Rachel Dempsey

This article will appear in print under the headline “Be a player, hate the game”